Guilty Pleasure

Those of you who know me (and that's pretty much everyone who reads this blog) knows my dislike of reality TV shows so it is with a heavy heart that I admit to a guilty pleasure on this blog. There is a reality show I do watch and it's (brace yourself) I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Now before you track me down for some form of intervention let me try and justify myself - wait.... no I can't - so let me just tell you why I like it. I'm a leftie liberal kind of guy which is great I'm a member of amnesty and other organisations and if there is a protest going on I'm there pen poised to write a letter or on the street with my badly written placard.

However this does not feed the politically incorrect side of my nature that part of me that wishes we still had the Victorian style freak shows. The part of me that loves the surgical museums with their two headed babies and twelve fingered hands floating in formaldihide.

This programme is the closest televisual equivalent of these entertainments. Here you have a bunch of individuals, most of whom are stretching the word "Celebrity" to its limits, who are willing to put themselves through the torments of the damned for a chance at another fifteen minutes of fame. Not only are they faced with spiders, scorpions, rats, snakes and heights each of them is also face to face with eight other egos. If Satre was right that "Hell is other people" then surely the next level of hell is other people who have spent the last ten years in Panto in Skegness and who would swallow wallaby shit for a chance at a semi recurring role in Last of the Summer Wine. Bringing added spice to all this is the semi confessional nature of the captured conversations surely there is little more entertaining than seeing someone who had a small part in Heartbeat cry on the shoulder of an overweight ex boyband member about the price of fame. Of course an additional pleasure and one which I have resisted is the voting for who does the challenges. I have avoided it because I am very very cheap and don't wish to spend a pound a go on a phone call. Thankfully the British public are sufficiently vicious so I don't have to.

So there it is my guilty pleasure. Well that and dressing gerbils up as members of the Nazi party but lets save that for another blog.